PeopleSoft CEO says .Net is IT ‘asbestos’

I can’t say that I agree with Mr. Conway of PeopleSoft in regard to his comment about .Net last week…

“PeopleSoft president and CEO Craig Conway has described Microsoft’s .Net initiative as the information technology equivalent of asbestos.”

“Conway then added that, in his opinion, Microsoft’s .Net strategy will not help business to control the costs of their enterprise applications, as it assumes code will be executed by PCs.”

Specifically, the second quote certainly seems a bit hypocritical since PeopleSoft up until version 7.02(?) was a hard-core Client/Server based application environment.

However, perhaps it is a sign of how far these titans of client/server computing have progressed in the last 5 or so years.

As far as this goes with .Net, in the short-term, PCs and especially Windows-based applications are not going away — Especially in the enterprise. It’s not something you can ignore or displace. Their ubiquity is a reality.

IMHO, .Net provides a means to enhance disparate desktop applications and provide the edge-glue to integrate with business process and enterprise legacy applications a like.